Thanksgiving, North African Style

Our Thanksgiving started out like any other...except only our foreigner friends knew we were celebrating anything at all. My doorman told us "Congratulations on your holiday" after explaining to him what today was. About 4 hours of our day was spent getting to and from our destination. We took a train to be with some friends about an hour way but it was raining and hard to get a taxi once we got there. Here are our wet bags of food we are carrying to the party.

There were about 40 Americans celebrating at this one small house. Our side dish we brought was (Hatch) green chili cream cheese corn (woot woot NM) and a six layer cookie bar desert. (Almost) Everything was so delicious. My favorite thing was the sweet potato casserole. The only thing we were missing was pumpkin pie (really difficult to make here). But that's okay maybe at Christmas.


Here we our at about 9:30 p.m. on the train back to our city.  We spent Saturday decorating our house. I love to have my house decorated b/c there is not many places that feel christmasy here. My version of Thanksgiving shopping weekend was a little different, but no less intense. There was a bizarre with all the embassies from around the world selling stuff at tables from their countries. After the King's wife made her way down the red carpet (I was in the front, 15 feet from her!) and looked around there was mad dash and stampede of hundreds of people to get in. Things I bought at the USA table include a Butterfinger and Reese's Peanut Butter cup.

Putting the final touches on our tree.


Hanging our chile lights, I am going to take these home with me so each year I hang them it will remind me of our three Christmas' here.

The finished product. I am really pleased how the decorations turned out this year. We did our outside door too. I love the holiday season! (it also includes my birthday and anniversary so that helps :)

Beautiful Barcelona

Last week we went to Barcelona, Spain.  We found a great hostal for only 36 euros a night and it was super nice and it was in a great location.  The weather was perfect and all the tourist spots were not packed at all.  

When we arrived we thought we were in Scotland because the streets were packed with Scots chanting, drinking, and singing.  The next day they were playing the Barcelona team in soccer so everyone was getting ready for the big game.  20,000 Brits and Scots came down and they were super drunk all day, starting at 9:00 a.m. when we left our hostal!  They wore their jersey's for three days in row and every other word that came out of their mouth was the "f" bomb!

This a building by the famous 19th Century architect Gaudi.  His works are the most famous attractions in Barcelona.  


Enjoying some time at a lovely park.  

We went into several Cathedrals (the free ones :)
Here is Cody admiring the view from the top of this park that is on a mountain that overlooks the whole city.  


This is the Gaudi park.  He has a crazy style and this lizard is super famous and everyone was taking photos of it, so I had to also.
Posing on the mosaic benches.  

Cody is crazy good at reading maps and getting us around new cities.  He remembers a new route after taking it just one time (I still got lost on N. Main in Las Cruces!)  He did such a good job finding the right metros and walking us the through the city.  

Every city has to have their version Arc de Triomf and here is theirs.  

This is Gaudi's crazy masterpiece that isn't finished.  He started it in 1882 and they don't expect completion for at least another 25 years.  The lighter part on the left is the newer portion of the building.  It's gonna be crazy when it's finished!

So blogger, has a new format (for Macs its new I guess) and let you do more stuff with font, colors, paragraph, and video now.  So I am pretty excited about the possibilities.  Although with the naked eye it may seem as though this post looks like every other one...it's different OKAY!  :)

The Rest of the Story

Well as you will read in my next post my blogger hasn't been working but all of the sudden it did and I was on a roll so I went ahead and decided to do two posts today to finish our time with Cody's parents.

Shopping in the market

Have to hold the snakes in this desert city!

Cody's love this breakfast dish. It's eggs with this meat (beef jerky-ish) stored in lard and then scooped out of a tub and cooked in a tagine dish. Personally, I find it offensive but some people really like it. Oh, and you eat it with bread with your hands like a normal tagine.

Here is Jan trying the McArabia at McDonald's. Ron went with the Big Mac :)

Communal cous cous bowl

We had some friends stop in for the night and they are super cool. Greg, Clinton and us hanging out on the roof

Don't know what we are doing here

Enjoying some coffee and the corner shop. (On the bottom of our building we have two coffee shops, furniture store, car dealerships, etc, note to self...blog about this later)

Last day. Posing on my new rug. Thanks guys for a great time!

Travelin' With the Folks

Okay, after SOOO much hassle I finally got these pics uploaded. Blogger has been driving me crazy and not letting me upload photos. Anyone else experiencing this problem? So we traveled for a week and here some pics from our time. We went to the village where my friend lives way down south and Jan I stayed at her house while Cody and Ron stayed with some American friends.

This is the Kasbah we have been to each time we make the trek to the village.

Of course they had to get us dressed up. Here is Jan as a Berber bride. I am posing with my North African serious pose (hard to get these people to smile)

This is my new rug!!! Click on the photos to enlarge, it's so colorful and a new style the Berber women are making. It's really cheap to buy rugs down south. I would never buy in the cities now, you pay triple the cost! (thanks for the Christmas present, Jan ;)

A beautiful women cooking some bread for the day. This is a shared oven, people just take turns cooking their bread and hanging out while they wait.

On the road to the village, this is an old gas station from a movie set. Tons of movies are filmed here. Anyone recognize this from a movie?

An old Berber women's hands dyed with henna.

Cute!!!

Me and my friend headed out to pick palm fronds to feed the goats.

Here is the next stop on our tour. A fishing town of the coast. It's very peaceful and chill and we really like this place. This is hooks attached to the side of boat.

Working the boats

Camel ride on the beach. I had to bargain for 20 minutes to get this dude to give us a little five minute ride to take our pics

I love this pic that Jan took and you can see my fresh henna work from the village